Hospital patients often find it difficult accomplish the ascent or descent of a hospital bed. Hospital beds are frequently higher off the ground than comparable home beds. Ambulatory patients are often encouraged to walk around to rebuild muscles which may have fallen out of use due to long confinement in bed or to certain surgical procedures. It is, therefore, helpful to provide a hospital step which can be attached to the beds of ambulatory patients which will allow the patient to get on or off the bed with ease and safety.
A number of attempts have been made to design bed steps which meet this need, most notably P. T. Valentino, the instant inventor, in her invention: the training foot stool (U.S. Pat. No. 4,222,136). Although this invention meets part of the need for a bed step it has a number of deficiencies. Since it is designed for mounting on the bottom rail of a hospital bed, when a patient mounts the step the step tends to rotate down and away from the bed. Since all the stress is on the bottom rail, the bottom rail tends to deform. There is also no provision for locking the invention to a rail; the invention simply rests upon the bottom rail. There is also no provision for storing the invention without removing it entirely from the hospital bed.